The project of men’s sobriety in the context of AA was in part a project of rehabilitating the damaged masculinity of alcoholics. Though the program encourages a letting go of grandiose thinking about wealth or power in favor of a focus on humility and making steady, modest gains, many postwar men’s recovery narratives reveal a “deep dedication to the role of self-reliant breadwinner.” In many families, the work of restoring well-being lay in a return to normatively gendered balance.
chapter twenty-five
While he is sleeping, there is so much to be done. Doctors’ appointments, dentist appointments, birthday invitations, school registration, lessons, sports, groceries, rent, gas, electricity, car payments, credit cards, student loans, debt collectors, holidays, library books, thank-you cards, classroom parties, presentations, playdates, science fairs, parent-teacher conferences, recitals, concerts, sing-alongs, photo albums, scrapbooks, Valentines. I forget sometimes that I am Mommy until I am jolted up at the first sound of their breathing. Who wants cereal, oatmeal, pancakes, banana, avocado, milk, juice? Time to get dressed, brush teeth, get backpacks, extra clothes, permission slips. These are the necessities. But wait, there’s more. Because I sign up for things. I say yes to things. Bring dishes to potlucks. Assemble kale salads dusted with pecorino. I signed up to head the decorating committee for my son’s preschool fundraiser just as my husband and I were moving out of our shared home and into separate apartments. Of course I did. Those first few days in that grimy sublet, while K lay in withdrawal in the bedroom, I made paper chains and crinkled hundreds of sheets of colored tissue paper into flowers to hang from the auditorium ceiling. I sat surrounded by them after the kids fell asleep, white wine warming at my side. I liked to throw a raspberry in the glass; it felt festive. I stuffed the decorations into a black plastic trash bag and barely made it to the school in time to hang them up.
Are you a parent? asked one of the haughty, wealthy preschool moms with incredulity when she entered the auditorium and found me standing on a ladder, clad in black, some black-metal band sweatshirt of K’s dragging almost down to my knees, with hair that hadn’t been washed in weeks, looking perhaps more like a drowned rat than a mom.
A-parent-ly, I shot back, flashing her a big fake smile. A few minutes later, my husband arrived to help me hang things across the high ceiling of the auditorium. The kids were with his mom.
Did you just drop them off? I asked.
No, they spent the night there last night, he said.
Oh. I let the strange, painful feeling of not having any idea where he was coming from wash over me. We kept working. The room was beginning to fill up with other parent volunteers, who arrived mostly in couples and dressed to the nines in anticipation of this themed fundraising event, which also included an auction. On long card tables sat oversized plastic-wrapped baskets full of sundry “goodies” from local businesses.
God, I can’t believe you signed up for this, my husband said a few minutes later from the top of the ladder, holding fishing twine between his teeth. I looked down. Actually, I can, he corrected.
The main mom who organizes all this shit cornered me in the parking lot and asked me if I would do it, I said defensively.
So what! he hissed back. You could have said no.
I could have said no to a lot of things. When my husband and I first met, I was working the desk at a yoga studio, in exchange for free classes. There were guinea pigs below the desk so the stuffy foyer smelled of human feet, wood shavings, and wriggling rodent heat. I always showed up for that work shift, signed all the customers in, even when too many late nights and hangovers kept me from actually taking a class myself. Hadn’t he chosen me for exactly that reason? That he knew I could be counted on to always put others, put him, first? Every alcoholic needs a codependent, his mother once told me matter-of-factly, as though she’d been holding the key to our relationship all along and it wasn’t love. I read her directness as viciousness, and only years later saw what she meant.
This is a theme. Unmanageability. I can’t do all the things I set out to do so I do things shoddily, huffily, poorly, quickly. I am brittle. I slam the pan back onto the burner. I close my tiny fingertips in doors and drawers and yowl in pain and the sound of the yowling carries so much more than the warranted anger and I am instantly ashamed. In the little losses of control, I catch a glimpse of the fact that it—my life—is big-picture out of control, it’s a little flash of chaos like touching the void for just a split second, and it is terrifying. The shame, most of all, is terrifying.
* * *
• • •
The night before my son’s fourth birthday, K lets me do some of the methadone he has (Why does he have methadone? Is he trying to get off dope?). I’ve never done it before and I get higher than I’ve ever been. A couch-bound trip into a dimension of droning numbness I have only dreamed about. An electric blanket. The children are with their father and even though their sweaty bodies are twisting in sleep in his warmly lit apartment nearby, an image that typically has the power to make my heart feel like it’s being wrested open, for a period of hours I forget even about them. I think about smoke, billowing and sweet, pumped in by a machine, filling the room. I think about a velvet-ceilinged planetarium. I think I’m in one. I think about methadone being called “government heroin” because it is heroin, it feels like heroin, how they describe the feeling of it and what I’ve seen it do to people’s faces, their mouths so open, deathlike, that bugs could crawl in. Nonono don’t think about that, but then the thought is gone. The next day I can’t stop vomiting. I vomited when I first took the drugs, too, but now even the slightest movement brings up a wave of spinning heat. The dampness in the air is cloying. I frost the chocolate cake I baked the day before and arrange the four little strawberries and the ring of blueberries outside its perimeter, and twice while I’m doing it I have to step away and open the back door to throw up. The frosting isn’t that shiny shit-brown, it’s homemade and more like a dusted-cocoa brown. A pretty color for a sweater, I think. I like all those rich-lady colors—mushroom, champagne. I have a vision of a different me, a new me, in dusted-cocoa cashmere, the me I could be today if I didn’t feel this way, if I hadn’t done what I’ve done. The birthday party doesn’t begin for a few hours, and it isn’t my responsibility to get the kids there, they’ll be arriving with their dad—freshly cleaned and combed, surely, to make me feel even worse—but this sickness, this dizzy regret, I can tell, will last all day. In the moments when I’m not braced, nauseated, against the countertop, I am steeling myself instead against wave after wave of self-hatred. It’s inescapable, this queasiness, the inside of my mouth stale, my saliva tepid and bitter as flat beer. Shit, babe, I’m sorry, it’s going to be okay, K tells me, as though I’ve stubbed my toe. His voice too chipper, too accustomed to this hardship in the body. Does he wake up this way every day? I’m overwhelmed by the human capacity for feeling like shit. It’s just a rough morning, he says, laying a hand on my shoulder, but look at this amazing cake you made! Being addressed directly is more than I can bear. I put my face in my hands. You’re a good mom, he says weakly into the intolerable quiet, offering an answer to the question I don’t have to ask.
Want me to come with you today? he asks, although we both know that today is not the right day to debut him.
No, no, it’s all right, I say.
The party is a screeching, toddler-ful affair I’ve organized by Evite in a local park. The kids are still too young to be dropped off so all of the parents stay, circling a picnic table awkwardly, pecking at carrots and hummus as the sun rises in the sky, begins to beam down punishingly. Above the tinny music coming through portable speakers, I hear the din of dads talking about start-ups. Almost always, the air in the Bay Area is cold and warm at the same time, and though I’ve mostly grown accustomed to it, today it is infuriating. Why would anyone want to live where it is never summer or winter? I think. Nev
er hot enough for a flowing dress nor cold enough for a real coat, where everyone insists on being outside in outdoorsy sandals with no socks even though when the wind blows, there is a bite in the air? A bite: the feeling of being snatched by cold, as if it had teeth, that ferocious little nip, nip, nip of the wind. The sun is hot on my forehead—I worry my makeup is going to melt, probably already is sliding around and looking orangey—but the armpits of my cardigan are icy cold with sweat.
Would it be better to be the mother who doesn’t show up to the party? That’s what a real addict would do. But that isn’t me, or isn’t me yet. The pressure to maintain is too strong. I still refuse to truly shirk, to give in to my weak side, to surrender to just being an absent mother, a shitty mother. And besides, I am so good at faking. My shirt is crisp and floral, purchased just for this purpose, and the ache in my cheeks from smiling reminds me to keep smiling. You okay? asks my husband while passing by me to retrieve a toddler-sized soccer ball from the bag he’s brought, lifting his enormous blue eyes toward me and seeming to bring my gaze up with them, a pull I can’t avoid, until we’re making eye contact. We know each other’s hangovers intimately. Sometimes we talk on the phone in the morning while we’re both on our way to work and I can tell by the slightly nasal quality in his voice that he’s had a rough night. In those moments, my pulse leaps. I feel protective, a hot bloom of familiar codependent concern, and I miss the pre-parenthood days of bringing him a cup of coffee in bed, and getting back under the covers with him to do the patchy arithmetic of recalling the night before and smoothing his existential unease. What would happen if I could say that to him right now? What if I could ask him for the same, for him to mollify me, ease this throbbing guilt? Just for a day, I want to be the alcoholic. I want a wife.
Yeah, I don’t feel great today, I say, looking down, but then our eyes catch for a second. Maybe I’m getting sick. I really hope not.
That would suck, he says, because he has to say something. He knows I’m off-kilter, can surely see the yellowing depression in my eyeballs. But we don’t look at each other too long these days—any sustained connection at all, even separated by a car window or screen door, opens a chasm of emotion and makes me cry. His awareness of my condition changes the air a bit, making me both a little defensive—I really am fine, I baked a beautiful fucking cake!—and a little sicker from the exposure, from feeling caught in this disgusting act. The act of living this new life, which is getting out from under me a bit more every day. My husband walks toward a gaggle of children and I feel pierced by his sudden absence. I want to lean on him, literally to stand against his massive frame and lean in, feel the broad, stiff warmth of his chest like the seat of a truck. But now he is standing over there, watching the little kids kick around a soccer ball the size of his palm, possibly thinking about the night I must have had with K last night. Maybe he’s picturing us drinking and fucking. But it wasn’t like that at all, I want to reassure him. I don’t want to block any of the comfort he might show me, any of the solicitous feeling he might still have. I want his sympathy, even though I believe that he is well within his rights to hate me forever. It’s something I still tell myself every day.
I am angry at K and at the darkness of the night we shared alone together on drugs. Heavy drugs, not weed or cute make-out drugs, party drugs. It is no longer romantic, the way this life is tawdrily closing in on us—for the first time, it’s us I worry about and not just him. We’ve done drugs together many times by this point, but none like this. I feel angry that he’s still at home, lying on the couch, maybe padding around in thick white athletic socks, or asleep with the remote hanging halfway out of his hand. He has the utterly maddening capacity to watch the same movie over and over and over again in the same day, a behavior I have never observed in any other human and that seems like an encapsulation of everything I think is wrong with him. I have the maddening capacity to ask him, How many times do you think you’ve seen this movie? when he’s watching one of his classics. Haven’t you seen this like four thousand times? It’s like I can’t not ask.
I don’t want him here at the birthday party, but I don’t want to be here alone. I don’t want to be proving day by day that I left an only slightly dysfunctional marriage for a profoundly dysfunctional, indeed unworkable, relationship with a man who doesn’t even have to do birthday party duty, doesn’t feel like he has to show up for special occasions, who sends me out the door supportively, saying, Good luck, babe, nice work on the cake, and then gets to go back to bed. But why would he show up? I think. He doesn’t know what any of this is like. He doesn’t get it. Doesn’t know the Trader Joe’s trip for the little watery bags of baby carrots and the multigrain chips with flax seeds that nobody likes but that we all need to believe might nudge our little families slightly closer to health, doesn’t know what an Evite is, for fuck’s sake. Doesn’t know that skinless sensation, the vulnerability of feeling judged and exposed around the other moms, how exhausting it is to corral the two kids into and out of the car. Knows only intermittently, momentarily, and as a witness, the car seats, the crumbs, the diaper bag. Of course, he can’t know motherhood. But couldn’t he at least get sober and become a real boyfriend, someone I could rely on, ask to carry things, ask to be with me in the joy and the heartache of raising these two small creatures? I get lost wondering whether he doesn’t show up for me because he has a disease or because he’s no good or simply because I don’t demand it. I don’t demand anything. I can’t seem to create a world in which anyone feels they have to do anything for me.
For three hours, I stand with my methadone hangover among the other parents and make small talk and smile, occasionally clutching at my roiling stomach, and once, seized by an urgent need to throw up, crouching out of sight and barfing hot bile into the grass. My throat burns. My son seems none the wiser, bouncing around seated on a large ball, playing dinosaurs with his friends, and finally (after the birthday song, which, like me, he hates because it draws excessive attention toward him) eating the chocolate cake, over which the gathered mothers coo. It seems he is having a lovely day, an oblivious day. But I know the truth: that I am awful. That this—today—is beyond redemption. That as tightly as I have my hands wrapped around the reins, I have lost control. The party winds toward its end with painful slowness, as though someone is hanging from the hands of time, dragging them backward. The wind grows more bitter. We untie the balloons from the poles of the fence. I put the plastic jugs of juice, the bottles of sparkling water, and the half-eaten trays of faded supermarket crudité back into short paper bags.
Every individual has to decide for herself how fucked up she needs to get in order to manage the demands of a life. How fucked up she is willing to get, and what of that chaos she will allow the world to see. At first, it’s a decision you can make. Eventually, you may become one of the ones who can’t control themselves, who are lost to the disease and walking around drunk or high out of their tree. I have been there, but only occasionally. Those memories are indelible, like the time in high school when we went to the Chinese restaurant on Third Avenue that served unlimited white wine and I vomited on the PATH train between Manhattan and Jersey City, wondering about the faces of the other passengers on the train, imagining them recoiling, contorting in disgust, but too drunk, my vision too blurred, to actually witness it. I had been drunk in all of the theatrical ways young people can be. But with age my drinking had gone indoors. I did my heaviest drinking at bars close to home, at home with friends, or by myself. The day of my methadone hangover, a tempest of acid and bloat in my gut, I felt the thinness of the membrane between keeping it together and watching it all fall apart. This was too far. But I still hadn’t had enough.
The rank sweat in my armpits and the crotch of my jeans grew warmer once I got in the car and turned the heater on. My temperature in the Bay Area: cold and then artificially hot. Cold and hot, cold and hot. My face flushed as the dry air from the front-seat vent began to
thaw me out. That was a fun party! I said to my son, eyeing him in the back seat.
* * *
• • •
One message of Twelve Step recovery is that we must set aside ego. After believing ourselves to be the star of the show for so long, believing that we could and should exert our will to manipulate the outcomes of relationships, it’s time to sit down and shut up. Each of us must become willing to be “a worker among workers.” But K just wanted the good shit out of life. He was raised to seek la dolce vita by Italian parents who made their own sausage. Out of every stew he plucked only the pieces of meat. He left the toilet paper roll on the holder after the toilet paper was gone, he drank juice until only a drop was left and returned the carton to the fridge.
The angry energy this brought out in me was tantrum energy, the same thing I recognized in my toddlers when they were hungry or tired or didn’t want to share. Squirming, full-diaper anger. I’d always been angry—a low-grade ire always bubbling, simmering away like a pot of rice on the back burner of my consciousness—but sometimes something else, a ferocious, hot anger would burst forth inside my body. It was especially likely to happen if I was moving my body, pushing it or taking care of it, as though that action jarred something loose. Just noticing that I was in a body, exerting some control over my own movements, brought up either the memory or the hope of a kind of freedom I seemed to have abandoned. I cried while running with pop music piped into my head through pink earbuds, cried at the bubblegum voices and the bass, timed to my sneakered steps, cried at the facile narratives of female empowerment wrought by heartbreak, all that phoenix-rising-from-the-ashes shit, all that “since you’ve been gone I can do whatever I want.” The couple times a year I got to a yoga class I cried in half pigeon, folded over myself feeling a knot of rage begin to untwine, a tight, tangled ball of emotion like the contents of a bird’s nest. Wire, wool, and hair.
Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls Page 24
